[rhelv6-list] Problems with XFS leaving 0-length files in RHEL 6.2 ... ?

[Paul Smith]

Hi all.  We've been using standard RHEL 6.2 on our test systems (no
updates, straight off of the Server DVD... however we load only a
small-ish subset of the full OS).

Lately we've been seeing issues where we have a number of 0-length files
on our partitions.  These systems have not (as far as I'm aware) crashed
or had any kind of power hit or anything like that, and the files that
are 0-length don't appear to be modified much, if at all.  It seems
bizarre that they should suddenly be empty.

These filesystems are on 2.7T partitions (each), and are on rack-mounted
servers with three harddrives RAIDed using an LSI MegaRAID SAS 2208
hardware RAID controller.

The filesystems are created using the XFS filesystem... mainly we chose
XFS because it's MUCH faster to create large partitions like this than
ext, which we're doing a good bit.  It was a supported filesystem in
RHEL 6.2, so I thought it would be robust.  I can't say for sure that
this is an XFS problem; I'm trying to get more rigorous about detecting
this problem closer to when it happens so I can check logs, etc.  On the
other hand I've heard rumors about issues like this in XFS, but I
thought all the known ones were resolved in RHEL 6.2.

So, I'm looking for information:
      * Does this seem likely to be an XFS problem?  Should we move to
        ext4?
      * Would it help this problem to go to RHEL 6.3?  Any known XFS
        issues,  esp. kernel issues, resolved between 6.2 and 6.3?  I
        took a spin through the 6.3 release notes but didn't see
        anything.